A Long 90 Minutes

The strike that had kept Manhattan's World Journal Tribune from publishing for more than three months was only 1 1/2 hours away from settlement. It looked like a long 90 minutes, courtesy of the Printing Pressmen, the only one of ten unions that had not come to terms with the newly merged corporation. Last week the World Journal Tribune was still insisting that the pressmen work an eight-hour shift on Saturday night, just as they do at the New York Times and the Daily News. The pressmen were still holding out for a 6 1/2-hour shift. Both sides stood pat.

Whatever the outcome, future negotiations between the New York news papers and the unions were immeasurably complicated last week when the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld an N.L.R.B. order forcing members of the New York Publishers Association to break ranks and bargain individually with the printers' union. While the Newspaper Guild's editorial employees have long dealt with each paper separately, the publishers have withstood the nine contentious craft unions largely by managing to bargain on a collective basis.

Predictably, the president of the printers' union, Bertram Powers, hailed the decision because, as he delicately put it, "it will enable us to meet the particular problems of the individual publisher." Just as predictably, John J. Gaherin, president of the Publishers Association --an organization whose very existence is threatened by the ruling--announced plans for an appeal, perhaps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which can accept or reject the case as it pleases. Though it was a unanimous 3-to-0 opinion, the lower-court judges were frankly uneasy. "I fear," wrote Judge Irving R. Kaufman, "that our decision will not alleviate, and might, perhaps, exacerbate the antagonisms which have been the antithesis of labor-management peace."

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